19.07.2025

This day last year, we had a classic car meet up, where car aficionados were invited to drive their restoration projects and park in front of the historic Johnstown Castle in Co.Wexford. For this event, we partnered with Irish Agricultural Museum at Johnstown Castle for a public lecture, From Star to Car with curator Matt Wheeler about the history of the Wexford Engineering ‘Star’ site and how it transformed from the manufacture of ‘Star’ ploughs to assembling Renault 4 cars.

With reference to, a number of exhibits documenting changes in farming life in the wake of the industrial revolution, Wheeler’s lecture traced the evolution of The Star Works, founded in 1893 from manufacturing locally branded horse-drawn and later, tractor-drawn ploughs. This move from manual to mechanised culminated in the assembly Pivot, which began around 1965 when the site started assembling cars, primarily the Renault 4. At one stage, at its peak; the factory employed around 200 workers and produced between 35 to 100 cars per day.  

Our talk at the museum as tour de force, presented a sequence of images that showed the process of re-animating the Renault 4 and recounting stories from its first trip outside the remise in 30 years, from Liliane’s hometown in Haute-Savoie across France to Ireland…